Single drive to RAID howto
 

Hi,

I have a single drive that I've configured exactly the way I want it. Whenever I need to build a new machine, I simply clone the single drive onto another drive. I use DD for the cloning.

Now I need to have some redundancy, so I just built a RAID1 system.

My question is: is there a way to take the info on the single drive, and migrate it over to my RAID1 array?

I thought about just tarring up the root directory (/) on the single drive, and then untarring it on the array, using a live CD. Would this work if I exclude /boot partition, and /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab?

Advice on a better way of doing this would be appreciated.

Try it and see. It won't destroy anything and you've thought it through.

lessee... the kernel needs to be able to handle RAID... you need to setup mtab and fstab properly. All the mountpoints have to be consistent. Carefully done, I see no reason a-priori that it shouldn't work. Try it - worst case is that you have to install, then copy over your saved files.

Let us know how it goes.